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The American Scholar
"The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity. Summary Emerson uses Transcendentalist and Romantic views to get his points across by explaining a true American scholar's relationship to nature. There are a few key points he makes that flesh out this vision: * We are all fragments, "as the hand is divided into fingers", of a greater creature, which is mankind itself, "a doctrine ever new and sublime." * An individual may live in either of two states. In one, the busy, "divided" or "degenerate" state, he does not "possess himself" but identifies with his occupation or a monotonous action; in the other, "right" state, he is elevated to "Man", at one with all mankind. * To achieve this higher state of mind, the modern American scholar must reject old ideas and think for him or herself, to become "Man Thinking" rather than "a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking", "the victim of society", "the sluggard intellect of this continent". * "The American Scholar" has an obligation, as "Man Thinking", within this "One Man" concept, to see the world clearly, not severely influenced by traditional/historical views, and to broaden his understanding of the world from fresh eyes, to "defer never to the popular cry." * The scholar's education consists of three influences: ** I. Nature as the most important influence on the mind ** II. The Past manifest in books ** III. Action and its relation to experience ** The last, unnumbered part of the text is devoted to Emerson's view on the "Duties" of the American Scholar who has become the "Man Thinking." Text of the Speech The American Scholar - Text of the entire speech Tossup Questions # This work prizes "blood-warm" writing about common things such as "The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan" over the cold and remote style of Pope, Johnson, and Gibbon. It attacks the "mischievous notion" that "the world was finished a long time ago," instead claiming that great thinkers mold the perception of nature, asserting "wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table." This work argues that the precepts "Know thyself" and "study nature" are really one maxim, and calls nature, books, and action the three main influences on the its central figure. This speech begins by telling a fable about Man being divided into many different parts, and argues that the right state of the title figure is "Man thinking." It ends by claiming "we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe," causing Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to call this speech a "literary declaration of independence." For 10 points, name this speech delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard in 1837 by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which called for an original national literature.